The Social Dynamics of Space and Place in the North African Writings of Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, and Brion Gysin

My dissertation argues that each author displays a nostalgia for the colonial order and the benefits that he enjoyed in the privileged situation of a Westerner within this order, but each sought ways of reconciling this longing with the logical and reasonable demands for independent governance made by the local peoples and the overall anticolonialist zeitgeist sweeping the "Third World" at the time. Bowles represented the changes enacted on the space of the region by modernization and Westernization as shallow and spiritless, taking ultimate refuge in representations of North African space heavily informed by local folk traditions. Burroughs, by contrast, drew on bits and pieces of the region, particularly Tangier, in imagining Interzone, a kind of utopian libertarian space that served as a more palatable alternative to the staidness and conformity of mid-century America. Gysin, finally, understood North African space as defined by revolution and conflict, a battleground for clashes between West and East, colored and white, and male and female.